February 23, 2007
Greatness at the Pentagon? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:55 AM EST I am not conversant enough with the various secretaries of defense (there have been 22 of them in the 60 years since the position was created in 1947) to have an informed opinion on which ones deserve to be labeled as great. It is somewhat amazing that anyone can run so vast an enterprise as the Pentagon, especially considering the huge permanent bureaucracy there, highly skilled at resisting changes they don’t like, and the constant interference of congressmen and senators, determinedly pushing whatever is good for their states and districts, regardless of the military’s needs. This website has a good rundown on each of them and so, perhaps, would be a place to start. Some of them had very short tenures. General Marshall served only slightly less than a year in the post and Elliot Richardson only four months. But I would like to say a good word for Charles E. Wilson, Eisenhower’s first secretary of defense, from 1953 to 1957, who is today chiefly remembered for a remark he never made, “What is good for General Motors is good for the United States.” I wrote about him and the origin of the misquotation in American Heritage in 1995, and that article can be found here. The Pentagon budget at the beginning of his tenure was 60 percent of the federal budget and equal to one eighth of GDP (today it is less than 20 percent of the budget and well under one twentieth of GDP). Wilson and Eisenhower were able to cut that very significantly, and using his considerable skills developed in running the world’s largest corporation, Wilson made the Pentagon a more efficient place. He deserves to be remembered for more than words that were put into his mouth by political opponents.
February 22, 2007
Greatness at the Pentagon? Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:45 PM EST During Joshua Zeitz and John Steele Gordon’s recent discussion of the Confederate flag and the South Carolina primary, my attention was caught by a comment by that primary’s most famous victim, John McCain. A few days ago, speaking in the Palmetto State, Senator McCain declared that Donald Rumsfeld “will go down in history as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history.” Redundant phrasing aside, McCain’s comment got me thinking: If Rumsfeld may be remembered as one of the Pentagon’s worst leaders, who should be remembered as its best? Unlike other cabinet positions, the office of defense secretary lacks a modern historical figure to define the way the job ought to be conducted. The Treasury Department has had exemplary leaders like C. Douglas Dillon and Robert Rubin. State Department officials can look up to figures like John Foster Dulles and Dean Rusk. Men like Nicholas Katzenbach and Eliot Richardson can serve as the very models for a modern attorney general. Who, among America’s defense secretaries, can claim to occupy a similar role in the national memory? This is not merely a rhetorical question; I am genuinely curious as to what answers my fellow bloggers might offer. I suppose the place to begin would be by defining the criteria by which one judges a secretary of defense. Presumably, they must include capability at managing the Pentagon bureaucracy, skill in obtaining funds on Capitol Hill, success at overseeing the military during violent conflict, and wisdom in advising the President. Clearly, a great defense secretary should have some combination of these accomplishments, along with a healthy dose of personal character. Looking down the list of Pentagon leaders, however, I fail to see one who is widely recognized for having achieved this. Surely George Marshall was a great man, but his tenure at the Pentagon was relatively insignificant. Robert McNamara was a technocrat and administrator extraordinaire—but he oversaw Vietnam. Caspar Weinberger was a temperate, deft manager who helped conduct some successful military operations. But then, one recalls, there’s Iran-Contra. It’s worth noting that AmericanHeritage.com took an online poll on this subject some time ago. Weinberger came out way ahead.
February 21, 2007
A World Without America Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 06:40 PM EST What would it be like? Check out this compilation of alternate-historical newscast clips put together by a British Web TV station to fight anti-Americanism in Britain and Europe.
February 21, 2007
Oliver Cromwell's Head Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:00 AM EST Mr. Gordon poses the following question: “To be sure, Oliver Cromwell’s corpse was dug up so that he could be hanged, drawn, and quartered, but since he’d been dead more than two years, I doubt that he suffered much. (I believe his head is in the possession of one of the colleges at Cambridge; I wonder what on earth they do with it. Perhaps Mr. Zeitz can report.)” To the best of my knowledge, in 1960 the fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, accepted the bequest of Oliver Cromwell’s head, which they buried on college grounds, somewhere in the vicinity of the chapel. They have very wisely declined to mark the spot where his head is interred, for fear that someone might attempt to exhume it.
February 21, 2007
A Modest Proposal III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:50 AM EST Just a few points, if I may. 1) The stars and bars was indeed the flag of treason. So, of course, was the battle flag, and so was the stars and stripes 80-odd years earlier. The only difference is that the American rebels of 1776 won their war, the Confederate rebels of 1861 lost theirs, and the winners get to decide what is treason. (Let me add that I am very glad the South did lose; there’s no enthusiasm here for The Lost Cause, even if many of my ancestors fought for it.) 2) As a matter of political tactics, I believe in moving the ball down the field rather than insisting on only touchdowns. I don’t like the battle flag flying proudly with all its racist baggage any more than Mr. Zeitz does. To have it gone and replaced with a flag that lacks that loathsome baggage strikes me as an advance down the field. It is an aspect of the Anglo-American genius for politics to make a virtue out of muddling through, to use half measures, and to not lose any sleep over intellectual inconsistency. Two half measures, after all, make a whole measure. 3) Further, it is no small part of the genius of the English-speaking peoples when it comes to politics that they have a remarkable ability to let bygones be bygone. After Charles II was restored in 1660, Parliament passed the marvelously named Act of Oblivion, essentially wiping out whatever treason against the crown had been committed. The only ones exempted were the “regicides” who had directly participated in the trial and execution of Charles I, and a few others. To be sure, Oliver Cromwell’s corpse was dug up so that he could be hanged, drawn, and quartered, but since he’d been dead more than two years, I doubt that he suffered much. (I believe his head is in the possession of one of the colleges at Cambridge; I wonder what on earth they do with it. Perhaps Mr. Zeitz can report.) Much the same was done after the American Civil War. It was a wise policy. 4) Mr. Zeitz writes, “In the years following Reconstruction, Northerners seemed oddly complicit in a vigorous cultural assault against common-sense memory. They joined Southerners in refashioning the war as an epic family feud in which Johnny Reb and Billy Yank each fought courageously and honorably, then buried the hatchet and became brothers again. A powerful combination—the passage of time, the disillusioning experience of Reconstruction, and hardening racial sensibilities in both regions—led many Northerners and Southerners to revel in shared military glory without dwelling too much on the causes of the conflict.” I don’t think it was odd at all. An important part of what makes it possible for bygones to be bygone, perhaps, is some willful editing of the collective memory. Just look at the result in this case. The United States today is by far the most heterogeneous nation on earth and yet it is the most politically cohesive, with no centrifugal forces in the body politic. We fought this titanic civil war and yet, within a generation, we were one nation indivisible. That is an astonishing political accomplishment. Would that have been the case if the North had continuously rubbed Southern noses in the dirt of their defeat and constantly reminded them of their prewar rhetoric? Far better to meet at bivouacs, talk over old times, swap stories, drink too much, and thus make it possible to face the future together as brothers, instead of endlessly nursing the grudges of the past, as Ireland has done for so long and at such cost. If that requires a little historical fudging, then so be it. As Lincoln prepared to leave City Point on April 8, 1865, after the surrender of Richmond, he asked the River Queen’s band to play “Dixie.” “That tune is now federal property,” he said, and it’s “good to show the rebels that, with us in power, they will be free to hear it again.”
February 20, 2007
A Modest Proposal II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes that the Confederate flag (as opposed to the Confederate battle flag) is “an honorable emblem of their ancestors’ ‘blood-bought immortality.’” While I certainly intend no disrespect to Mr. Gordon, who is hardly responsible for what his great-great-grandfather did in 1861, I couldn’t disagree more. It is, for one, the flag of treason, which is precisely what its followers committed when they raised arms against the United States. As a general rule, nations do not honor treason with public commemorations or iconography. That few people recognize the flag does not rob it of its meaning. It is also the flag of chattel slavery. To understand the meaning behind the emblem, one need only read the words of Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate States of America, who famously said that the “corner-stone” of the new nation “rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” Several years ago I contributed articles to the Washington Post and Dissen on the issue of the Confederate battle flag. If readers will indulge a little recycling on my part, the following is an edited excerpt from my Washington Post piece and makes the counterargument to Mr. Gordon’s modest proposal: In the debate over the presence of the Southern Cross on various state flags, many impartial observers continue to repeat the worn platitude that the flag is an emotional issue for white and black Southerners alike. As Boston Herald columnist Don Feder argued, “Southerners have every right to be proud of their heritage. . . . If Lincoln were alive today, he would say let the South honor its heroes. Race relations aren’t advanced by denigrating a symbol good Americans died for. . . .” Surprisingly, such statements aren’t new. This value-neutral interpretation of the Civil War emerged within a few decades of the war’s conclusion. As the nineteenth century neared its end, the ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass denounced the collective amnesia that he thought had taken hold of the nation. “What was bad before the war, and during the war, has not been made good since the war,” he admonished a crowd assembled in 1894 at Mt. Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York. “Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery . . . there was a right side and a wrong side in the late war which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget.” Douglass was outraged by the willingness of the victorious to forgive and forget the trespasses of the vanquished. In the years following Reconstruction, Northerners seemed oddly complicit in a vigorous cultural assault against common-sense memory. They joined Southerners in refashioning the war as an epic family feud in which Johnny Reb and Billy Yank each fought courageously and honorably, then buried the hatchet and became brothers again. A powerful combination—the passage of time, the disillusioning experience of Reconstruction, and hardening racial sensibilities in both regions—led many Northerners and Southerners to revel in shared military glory without dwelling too much on the causes of the conflict. This spirit of reconciliation, and its emphasis on combat over ideology, found its most popular expression in a vogue that swept America in the 1880s and 1890s: blue and gray reunions. Veterans and their families attended hundreds of these gatherings. Reflecting and nourishing the nation’s fascination with all things military, The Century—a popular, widely circulated magazine—ran an acclaimed series of articles between 1884 and 1887 on “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.” The editors explained that “no time could be fitter for a publication of this kind than the present, when the passions and prejudices of the Civil War have nearly faded out of politics, and its heroic events are passing into our common history where motives will be weighed without malice, and valor praised without distinction of uniform.” Until recently, historical consensus held that soldiers in the 1860s were driven by a variety of impulses, most of them vague: courage, honor, local ties, manly valor. Conspicuously missing from that list were theoretical commitments to the preservation or abolition of slavery. Writing in this vein nearly 50 years ago, Bell Irvin Wiley, who at the time was considered the leading authority on Civil War military culture, claimed that “American soldiers of the 1860s appear to have been . . . little concerned with ideological issues.” But more recent scholarship suggests that many Confederate soldiers knew well the ends for which they fought. The historian James M. McPherson, of Princeton University, has argued that “ideological motifs almost leap from” the written record bequeathed by Civil War soldiers. After reading more than 25,000 personal letters and 249 journals penned by Union and Confederate troops, McPherson concluded that a “large number of those men in blue and gray were intensely aware of the issues at stake and passionately concerned about them.” McPherson found that Confederate soldiers often made explicit mention of the need to preserve slavery. Sometimes they couched their purpose in the South’s regional idiom—for instance, the need to protect Southern “liberties” and “institutions.” But even a casual student of American history understands what such expressions implied. As Abraham Lincoln famously complained in 1854, the “perfect liberty they sigh for is the liberty of making slaves of other people.” One especially popular Civil War myth, often used to guard ordinary Confederates against the judgment of history, is that the struggle was a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” It's true that only one third of Confederate soldiers were slaveholders or members of slaveholding families. But as McPherson reminds us, non-slaveholders also had a commanding property interest in the institution. “That property was their white skins,” he explained, “which put them on a plane of civil equality with slaveholders and far above those who did not possess that property.” Indeed, McPherson’s research painstakingly chronicles the racial obsessions of everyday soldiers who did not own slaves but who feared the social consequences of emancipation. “I never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white person,” wrote one such artilleryman in 1862. “There is too many free niggers . . . now to suit me, let alone having four millions.” Seventy-five years after the Civil War, the novelist William Faulkner captured revisionism’s powerful grip on the Southern mind. Colonel Sartoris, a character in several Faulkner novels and short stories, is asked in one of them why he fought for the Confederacy. Sartoris replies simply: “Damned if I ever did know.” In Mr. Gordon’s proposal, the ghost of Colonel Sartoris lives on.
February 20, 2007
A Modest Proposal Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:30 PM EST Hillary Clinton was campaigning yesterday in South Carolina—which is likely to have an important, perhaps decisive, primary next year. She called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds. It used to fly over the capitol building itself but now is flown from a separate flag pole. Senator Clinton said, “I think about how many South Carolinians have served in our military and who are serving today under our flag and I believe that we should have one flag that we all pay honor to, as I know that most people in South Carolina do every single day . . .”
All politicians, not just Senator Clinton, are on the horns of a dilemma here. The so-called Confederate flag is understandably and deeply offensive to many people because of its association with Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and violent opposition to the civil rights movement in the middle years of the twentieth century. On the other hand, millions of decent, non-bigoted Southerners have ancestors who fought for the Confederacy and who sacrificed their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for what they genuinely thought was a just cause. It is not unnatural that they would want that sacrifice memorialized, and there are few symbols more emotionally powerful than a flag.
As an example of how deep those feeling can run, consider Major William Meade Pegram, who happens to be my great-great-grandfather. Virginia-born but Maryland-bred, he sided with the Confederacy and was commissioned a captain by the Confederate secretary of war, Judah P. Benjamin, in January 1862, in the recruiting service. He resigned this commission in order to serve in the “Black Horse” light Virginia cavalry. He had three horses shot out from under him before being wounded at Brandy Station, June 9, 1863, the greatest cavalry engagement of the war. He served as an aide to the adjutant general of the Confederate Cavalry Corps, J. E. B. Stuart, until the latter’s death in 1864, and is mentioned in Douglas Southall Freeman’s Lee’s Lieutenants: “Down the road there rode rapidly toward the battalion a courier who drew rein and called for the commanding officer. Major Haskell stepped forward. As good luck would have it, the courier was a fine young Baltimore boy of the distinguished name of Pegram.”
After the war Pegram returned to Baltimore and flourished in the insurance business. But he was also a published poet, and in 1907 he wrote and delivered the Official Opening Hymn at the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. In 1909, when the state of Ohio returned to Maryland the captured battle flag of the Second Maryland Infantry (which had fought for the Confederacy), Pegram wrote the following:
Recovered relic of those stirring days,
Long lost, ne’er surrendered, now restored,
We greet thee, to thy donors give the praise,
For loving kindness, not to be ignored.
We hail thee: ‘Hallowed Banner!” and we love
To con o’er fields where thou wast proudly borne
Straight to the front, which did the prowess prove
Of those great souls, all, save a few, now gone!
We honor that brave band, whose every breath
Marked deep devotion to the holy cause
Wherein they struggled, even unto death:
Defending homes! Upholding righteous laws!
And here, dear flag, we place thee now to rest
Among they fellows, evermore to be
Entombed in state, amid the sacred, blest
Emblems of blood-bought immortality!
So what to do? Senator Clinton chose to call for the flag’s removal. I have a modest proposal to make as an alternative. What everyone—except serious historians of the Confederacy and vexillologists—thinks of as “the Confederate flag” in fact is no such thing. It is the battle flag. And, as far as I’m concerned, it is ruined as a symbol by its post–Civil War associations, just as no one can look at a swastika—a design of great antiquity—without thinking of the Nazis.
So why not fly the national flag of the Confederacy instead? The Confederacy had three national flags during its four-year existence. The first, known as “the stars and bars” was the national flag until 1863, when it was replaced with the second, known as “the stainless banner.” At the very end of the war, fearing that the second flag could be mistaken for a surrender flag on a windless day, the third flag was adopted.
 | | Top left: The Confederate battle flag. Top right: The first flag of the Confederacy. Bottom left: The second flag of the Confederacy. Bottom right: The third flag of the Confederacy. |
The stars and bars would certainly serve as a memorial to those who fought under it and its successors, but it is free of the stain of twentieth-century racism. Most people, I fancy, seeing it flying from a pole on the capitol grounds in Columbia would have no idea what it was and go on about their business. But those who cared most certainly would recognize it as an honorable emblem of their ancestors’ “blood-bought immortality.”
February 19, 2007
The Tawdry Tale of Robert Hanssen Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:45 PM EST Over the weekend I went to see the movie Breach. Based on the story of FBI traitor Robert Hanssen, Breach is part of a series of films this year that are beginning to revive the spy movie as a genre. I went in with low expectations, as I am no great fan of Ryan Philippe, the leading man. I came away impressed and disturbed. Like The Good Shepherd, another of this year’s much-heralded spy movies, Breach deals with the fairly recent institutional history of the American intelligence establishment. Robert Hanssen was arrested in the winter of 2001, but his career as a double agent stretched back to 1985. Working simultaneously for the United States and the Soviet and Russian intelligence services, Hanssen became the most damaging traitor in American history. Perhaps because he worked for the FBI, rather than the more enigmatic CIA, Hanssen’s name has never become as famous as that of Aldrich Ames. But the damage he did to his country was at least as significant. Also like The Good Shepherd, Breach makes some revisions to the historical record in order to present a compelling story. Most notably, the movie’s portrait of Hanssen is rather more sympathetic than the man deserves. The ever-capable Chris Cooper depicts Hanssen as a deeply disturbed man who is the victim of his own perversions. His actions don’t come across as malevolent or evil. When he gives state secrets to the Russians, one is tempted to judge his betrayal by the same terms that one judges a binge-drinking alcoholic. He’s clearly doing something terrible—but can he really help himself? The actual history of Hanssen’s arrest and trial shows that he was (and is) a psychologically unstable man. But Hanssen has also demonstrated a self-awareness and level of conscious intent that indicate he’s something more than just a madman. Hanssen compromised some of his country’s most stunning secrets, such as information about America’s missile arsenal and the ways in which it might respond to a nuclear attack. As detailed by the Washington Post, Hanssen did all this not merely for monetary gain but also for the personal satisfaction of becoming a great traitor. To an extent that Breach does not detail, Hanssen was determined to go down in history as a master spy—a far more cerebral, influential, and sexually perverse James Bond. This revision of history is understandable, since the resulting image of Hanssen is much more interesting for its moral ambiguity. Less understandable is Breach’s omission of one vital element of the effort to capture Hanssen. At the end of the film, the FBI and particularly the young do-gooder Philippe come off quite well. They appear to have worked hard to plug a terrible leak, and in so doing helped protect their country and salvage their own careers. What Breach does not depict is the help the FBI got from at least one source inside the Russian intelligence agencies. What ultimately brought down America’s worst traitor was, ironically, another traitor, not just conscientious investigative work by the FBI. In a film that seeks to illustrate some of the ambiguities of espionage, this is a surprising oversight. For a spy movie, though, these are relatively mild alterations of history. The Good Shepherd received even warmer critical appraisal than Breach, despite portraying the Bay of Pigs fiasco as, essentially, a New Haven sex scandal gone crazy. Even considering its creative liberties, Breach is a valuable portrait of the recent past and a chilling reminder of the challenges of counterintelligence. [Editor’s note: Allen Barra’s AmericanHeritage.com review of Breach can be found here.]
February 19, 2007
The Cashless Society Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:20 PM EST Many inventions that seemed destined to be with us forever are disappearing into museums, thanks to the digital technology that has already greatly changed the quotidian world and will change it beyond imagination in the next 50 years. I wrote about the incandescent light bulb the other day. The Economist this week has a cover article on a vanishing technology far older than the light bulb: money. Well, not money exactly, just the stuff we have thought of as money for more than 2,500 years. In reality, coins mostly disappeared from circulation over 40 years ago. A coin, by definition, is made of metal whose value is a substantial percentage of the coin’s face value. But the rising price of silver in the 1960s forced the United States to switch over to base metal. What fills up coffee cans in millions of households today is tokens, something of little intrinsic value that is, nonetheless, accepted in payment. Paper money, of course, has always been essentially tokens. Beginning in the 1950s, plastic money—charge cards, credit cards, and later debit cards—began to replace paper money and checks. In recent years, thanks to the Internet, more and more people have been paying their bills online, making checks far rarer. Twenty years ago, I wrote a couple of dozen checks a month, and got cash from the bank maybe twice a week. Today I write no more than one or two checks a month and hit an ATM about as often. Now, as The Economist explains, we are going one step further. It is becoming increasingly possible to simply pass your cell phone by a terminal and—voila!—you’ve paid, whether it’s for the tabloid newspaper you bought to read on the subway or, at least theoretically, the new Ferrari you bought with your zillion-dollar Wall Street bonus. (I hasten to add that I haven’t the foggiest idea how this works.) Therefore it seems likely that in 20 years or so, for the first time since the Persians were gearing up to take over Greece, money will be nothing more than submicroscopic ones and zeroes in the bowels of computers located anywhere on the globe. It will have no physical existence at all.
The winners in this profound transformation will be commerce in general (money is an economic catalyst, and the easier it makes effecting transactions, the more transactions there will be, and the more wealth will be created), statisticians, and the IRS. Losers will be anyone in a traditionally cash-based business—low-end restaurants, newsstands, waiters, barbers, heroin dealers, etc. Also losers will be check-printing companies, bank tellers and bank robbers, Brinks truck drivers, and street muggers. Prostitutes, I’m reliably informed, will not be seriously affected; apparently they’ve been taking plastic for years.
February 19, 2007
John Steele Gordon and the Uses of Evidence II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:25 AM EST 1) I would think that the smartest little boy in the world would be able to tell whether it is he or someone else who is having a temper tantrum. I wrote the mild, indeed tentative, “But it seems to me that Joshua Zeitz mischaracterizes what Rep Young said . . .” and Mr. Zeitz has been at Def-Con 5 ever since. For future reference, it’s the one who is making the most noise and hurling ad hominem insults like, oh, just to pick one at random, “Mr. Gordon’s latest temper tantrum,” who is having the temper tantrum. 2) He writes, “Nowhere has Mr. Gordon actually demonstrated . . . James Zogby’s alleged animosity toward George W. Bush.” I quoted him to that effect in his completely wrong prediction on the outcome of the 2004 election. Those are not the words of a pollster completely without a dog in the fight. 3) He writes, “Can you provide a scientific study of James Zogby’s methodology that reveals a flawed approach in his data collection or analysis?” No. But then I don’t have to. Mr. Zeitz didn’t present any evidence that the poll was valid, not even so basic a datum as the margin of error. He simply gave the poll results as though they were revealed truth to be gratefully accepted by a waiting nation. He didn’t even give the readers a link, which I did. 4) I pointed out that Mr. Zeitz failed to provide the evidence necessary to evaluate the poll and yet it is Mr. Zeitz who writes, “If you can’t [prove it false], then please, for once, spare us this nonsensical exercise you pass off as good scholarship.” Let’s see, he presents raw poll results, which are routinely and notoriously misused in politics and journalism, as proof positive; I say more is needed to prove his point; and yet I’m the lousy scholar. Scholar, heal thyself. 5) He writes, “Though John Steele Gordon forgets all too often that American Heritage is a magazine concerned with history, the rest of us haven’t.” Hmmm, I guess Mr. Zeitz thinks the editors are as stupid as he thinks I am, for allowing me space on their website and in their magazine. But then, to the smartest little boy in the world, I guess everybody is stupid.
February 18, 2007
History of the Zogby Poll Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:45 PM EST As I see the Zogby poll has become a point of contention in this weekend’s Zeitz-Gordon debate, I thought it would be worth referring interested readers to a 2004 New Yorker profile of John Zogby and his organization. John Steele Gordon asserts that Zogby’s polls are compromised by the pollster’s dislike for President Bush. Josh Zeitz asks for evidence of the poll’s bias. I know pollsters who distrust Zogby, but because of his experimental methodology rather than any partisan slant. Much of Zogby’s polling is done on the Internet, which remains a relatively untested ground for public opinion surveys. When you poll over e-mail or using text messages, you risk repeating the mistakes of the famous 1936 Literary Digest poll. As The New Yorker details, that survey faltered because it chose its sample “primarily from automobile registries and telephone books.” This produced a sample skewed toward the affluent and resulted in an embarrassingly erroneous prediction for the presidential election. When you poll on the Internet, it seems likely that you skew your sample toward people who own computers and who regularly go online. This skew probably isn’t half as bad as that of the Literary Digest poll, but Zogby is nevertheless sailing in uncharted waters. More relevant to the immediate debate on this blog, though, is an observation in the New Yorker article about earlier attitudes toward the Zogby poll. Although Zogby’s chief pollster clearly leans to the left, he has not always been seen as a liberal zealot. According to The New Yorker, “Zogby finds it one of the odder twists in his career that he has been adopted by Republicans. Because he predicted correctly in 1996 that Clinton would win by a far smaller margin than most polls were forecasting, many on the right decided that here, finally, was a pollster who saw things the way they were. He was hired by the conservative New York Post, and appeared on Fox News programs and the Christian Broadcasting network. Rush Limbaugh praised him.” People like good news and they like the bearers of good news. The recent history of Zogby’s organization is proof enough of that. His poll used to furnish Republicans with encouraging predictions (Lazio neck-and-neck with Clinton!). Predictably, Zogby has fallen out of favor with the right as the results of his polling have become less encouraging to them.
February 18, 2007
John Steele Gordon and the Uses of Evidence Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:15 PM EST As per usual, John Steele Gordon has hurled about a good deal of invective, and he hopes that readers won’t notice that he hasn’t provided a substantive answer to a single one of the responses I issued to his post. He’s too busy insulting me to deal in pesky things like evidence. Take for example the following lines from Mr. Gordon’s latest temper tantrum: “Mr. Zogby’s personal animosity to President Bush should be taken into account here. There is plenty of evidence that troop morale in Iraq, despite the best efforts of liberals and their cheerleaders in the media, remains very high. The fact that many of them would like to come home strikes me as more than a bit obvious. The percentage of people who would like to leave a dentist’s office quickly is quite high too, I imagine, although I haven’t commissioned a Zogby poll on the subject in order to be sure.” Nowhere has Mr. Gordon actually demonstrated (a) James Zogby’s alleged animosity toward George W. Bush or (b) that there is “plenty of evidence that troop morale in Iraq, despite the best efforts of liberals and their cheerleaders in the media, remains very high.” If this is so, Mr. Gordon, please inform me, and the readers of this magazine, of which studies or surveys prove either point. Where is your proof of healthy troop morale? (Can you provide anything beyond anecdotal evidence?) Can you provide a scientific study of James Zogby’s methodology that reveals a flawed approach in his data collection or analysis? If you can’t, then please, for once, spare us this nonsensical exercise you pass off as good scholarship. If he actually bothered to read the data from the Zogby poll (the same poll for which he provided a link to top-line results), Mr. Gordon would learn that the troops Zogby surveyed didn’t support their own withdrawal from Iraq; they supported an American withdrawal from Iraq. Two very different things. One is self-interested, one isn’t. The dentist analogy, while sort of clever, is wholly irrelevant. But, then, so much of what Mr. Gordon writes usually is. Though John Steele Gordon forgets all too often that American Heritage is a magazine concerned with history, the rest of us haven’t. Indeed, the question of how to measure troop morale is a nettlesome one. Zogby touted his poll as the first-ever statistical survey of troops in a combat zone, and to the best of my knowledge, this claim is correct. For scholars of earlier wars, the diaries, letters, and folk cultures of soldiers are the best cumulative measure of morale. Two of the finest professional histories of wartime military culture that I’ve encountered are James McPherson’s slim but deeply-researched volume on Civil War era soldiers, For Cause and Comrades, and Christian Appy’s fine book, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers in Vietnam. In reading McPherson’s study, one is struck by the high rates of literacy among Union and Confederate soldiers and by their intense political engagement. In short, Civil War–era soldiers read, thought, and wrote about and debated the political issues of the 1860s. Appy’s book does not address the question of political engagement in such direct terms but finds that soldiers and marines were acutely aware of the class dynamics that influenced the draft. In 1864 over three-quarters of Union soldiers supported Abraham Lincoln’s reelection bid over their former commanding officer, George McClellan. This, despite Lincoln’s open embrace of his party’s emancipation platform. While certainly a statistically imperfect measure of troop morale, this figure has been widely interpreted as evidence that there was a critical shift between 1862 and 1864 in military attitudes toward slavery and emancipation. I’m sure that James Zogby’s poll of Iraq war servicemen and servicewomen suffers the same problems as every other political survey, but given the leeway with which we draw conclusions about the attitudes of soldiers in past wars from spotty sources, it seems reliable enough evidence of a critical disconnect between the current Commander in Chief and the men and women he has sent to war.
February 18, 2007
Dragging Lincoln Into Iraq VI Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:25 PM EST Let me take up the points in the latest post by Joshua Zeitz one by one. 1) Obviously I should have done what Mr. Zeitz evidently did and looked it up. Instead I lazily added two and two and, in this case, came up with five. My apologies. My mistake, however, does not affect my point in the slightest. 2) In faux-quoting Lincoln, I’m sure that Rep. Don Young was no more expecting his words to be taken seriously (i.e., congressmen opposed to the “surge” should be hanged) than Mr. Zeitz expects his words “my good friend John Steele Gordon” to be taken seriously. He is not my good friend; in fact, I have never met Mr. Zeitz. But then I’ve been lucky all my life. I doubt that Abraham Lincoln meant to be taken literally when he wished of Wall Street gold speculators that “everyone of them had his devilish head shot off.” Hyperbole in political debate, as in real life (“Hi, honey, what’s for dinner? I’m starving!”) is fairly common. 3) Assuming it’s this one, the poll was released February 28, 2006, and so could not have been conducted in March of last year. I guess we all make mistakes. But polls such as this one, especially if the “internals”—the precise questions asked and the precise sampling methodology used—are not known, are junk. The media and political partisans love polls like this because they generate headlines for fools to believe. Of course, if the poll results can’t be massaged into producing the right headline, they simply disappear. While John Zogby is a respected pollster, his track record is far from perfect. As Wikipedia reports, “Before polls had even closed in the 2004 presidential election, Zogby predicted a comfortable win for John Kerry (311 electoral votes, versus 213 for Bush, with 14 too close to call), saying that ‘Bush had this election lost a long time ago,’ adding that voters wanted a change and would vote for ‘any candidate who was not Bush.’” Oops. Mr. Zogby’s personal animosity to President Bush should be taken into account here. There is plenty of evidence that troop morale in Iraq, despite the best efforts of liberals and their cheerleaders in the media, remains very high. The fact that many of them would like to come home strikes me as more than a bit obvious. The percentage of people who would like to leave a dentist’s office quickly is quite high too, I imagine, although I haven’t commissioned a Zogby poll on the subject in order to be sure. 4) See (2), above. Mr. Zeitz writes, “I’ll explain this slowly, and in small words, so that Mr. Gordon understands . . .” I didn’t realize that Mr. Zeitz counts the terminally stupid among his “good friends.” But seriously, folks . . . Mr. Zeitz seems to have been told once too often when he was growing up that he was the smartest little boy in the world. Surely by now he should have realized that the people who say such things to bright children are prone to exaggerate and even to fib. He should get over it. 5) Again, see (2), above.
February 17, 2007
Dragging Lincoln Into Iraq V Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:55 PM EST Fred Smoler notes that Abraham Lincoln “did not exile Vallandigham in the normal sense of the word, because Lincoln did not recognize the sovereignty of the Confederacy, so Lincoln in effect had Vallandigham sent from one portion of U.S. territory to another. When Vallandigham later came back into Union-controlled territory from Canada, Lincoln left the man unmolested, and Vallandigham was allowed to engage in political activity with perfect impunity.” This is true, but it’s more complicated still. Lincoln consistently maintained that secession was illegal and that the Confederacy was not a separate country, and consistent with this interpretation, he almost always referred to the conflict as a ”rebellion,” not a war. (Though he did occasionally refer to the conflict as a civil war—most famously in the Gettysburg Address—he employed the term “rebellion” more than 400 times.) But early on in the conflict, Lincoln ordered a blockade of Southern ports, a measure that ultimately proved extremely effective in crippling the Southern economy. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles and Secretary of State William Henry Seward warned Lincoln that international law regarded a blockade as a declaration of war between two belligerent and sovereign powers and suggested, instead, that he “close” Southern ports. But Lincoln, fearing that European powers would defy a simple declaration of port closure and continue trading with and arming the South, pressed ahead with the blockade. Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, loudly protested. “We were blockading ourselves,” he observed, a “great blunder and absurdity” that compromised the Union’s legal definition of the conflict as a rebellion, not a war. “As a lawyer,” Stevens told Lincoln, “I should have supposed you would have seen the difficulty at once.” “Oh well,” the President replied. “I’m a good enough lawyer in a Western law court, I suppose, but we don’t practice the law of nations up there. I supposed Seward knew all about it, and I left him to it. . . . It’s done now and can’t be helped, so we must go along as well as we can.” It was one of Lincoln’s typical deployments of self-effacing humor to counter an opponent’s charges. In other words, in word Lincoln denied the sovereignty of the Confederacy; in deed he inadvertently acknowledged it. So, did he “exile” Vallandigham or relocate him within the United States? It’s hard to say. On a scarcely related note, a few clarifications for my good friend John Steele Gordon, who managed to avoid history altogether in his brief for the White House: 1. Mr. Gordon is incorrect. Jack Murtha is not the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. In fact, Murtha is not even a member of the Armed Services Committee. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee is Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri. Murtha chairs an Appropriations Subcommittee that has authority over military spending. Perhaps this is what Mr. Gordon was thinking of. 2. Mr. Gordon is also incorrect in asserting that I mischaracterized Rep. Don Young’s remarks. His short speech (only 528 words) opened with the faux Lincoln quote (“Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled or hanged”) and continued several lines down with the following: “This resolution will undermine and cause a morale disruption to our troops. Nowhere can you be in the field and understand the Congress of the United States now is not going to support them when they say they do, when they say they are going to cut their funding in the future.” While Mr. Young did not suggest arresting, exiling or hanging all critics of the war, he clearly suggested the arrest, exile or hanging of its congressional critics. By splitting hairs, Mr. Gordon artfully dodges this problem. 3. Mr. Gordon writes: Murtha’s “bill, if enacted, would force defeat on the United States. Sounds a bit like sabotage to me and would inescapably undermine troop morale. Defeat always does.” Interesting proposition, but not correct. A poll conducted in March 2006 by Zogby revealed that only 23 percent of troops serving in Iraq thought they should remain “as long as they are needed,” compared with 72 percent who thought they should pull out within 12 months, and 29 percent who felt they should be withdrawn immediately. This was a first-of-its-kind poll in that the target universe of troops serving in the combat zone. What it tells us is that the servicemen and servicewomen in Iraq aren’t going to suffer a loss of morale if the Democratic Congress takes steps to curtail their operations and bring them home. They reached the same conclusion almost a year ago. 4. Mr. Gordon writes: “And how what Representative Young—exercising his right of free speech—said is ‘obnoxious to the principle of free speech’ is a mystery to me.” Representative Young suggested that congressmen who oppose the Bush administration’s war policy are undermining the war effort and should thus be arrested, exiled, or hanged. I’ll explain this slowly, and in small words, so that Mr. Gordon understands: It is obnoxious to the principle of free speech to arrest, exile, or hang legislators for expressing their opposition to a President’s war policy. Moreover, Article I, Section 6, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that members of Congress “in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace,” shall “be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place.” So not only is Don Young’s speech dishonest and obnoxious to the principles of free speech; it also proposes a gross violation of the constitutional privileges accorded to members of Congress. 5. Mr. Gordon concludes his post by posing the following problem: “I also fail to see how criticism of the left by those on the right is dangerous to the Democratic process. It seems like the essence of it to me, just as criticism of the right by those on the left is.” Again, very slowly, to help Mr. Gordon get past his confusion: Criticizing the left is all good; calling for the arrest, hanging, or exile of congressmen who oppose the war is not. The suggestion runs counter to democratic process. I never said that Don Young doesn’t have a right to call for the arrest, exile, or hanging of his congressional colleagues. Unlike Mr. Young, I don’t believe in hanging or arresting people who utter things I find obnoxious. Words have meaning, and I’m not stifling anyone’s speech when I make the simple observation that Young’s words were offensive to democratic values. Got it, Mr. Gordon?
February 17, 2007
Stand By Your Man? Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:35 AM EST I’m enjoying the ongoing discussion of Don Young’s botched attempt at presidential quotation. As John Steele Gordon points out, there are countless examples of politicians and public figures tripping up on misremembered, misattributed, or just plain invented quotations from history. There has to be a special category of criticism, though, reserved for public figures who misquote or misrepresent their own past remarks. On Friday, John McCain launched his new campaign website, featuring a promotional video titled “Stand Up.” The tone of the video and the site are a little strange; the soundtrack to “Stand Up” sounds like it was taken from 24. All the same, I was struck by the clip at the end of McCain’s video that features him making a speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention. In that speech, McCain closed passionately, declaring: “Keep that faith. Keep your courage. Stick together. Stay strong. Do not yield. Do not flinch. Stand up. Stand with our President and fight. We’re Americans. We’re Americans, and we’ll never surrender.” The clip on his site features the same strongly worded portion of his address, but absent a crucial portion: “Stand with our President and fight.” It seems like a lot has changed in a couple of years. Given what Don Young thinks of elected officials who don’t support the President, McCain might want to avoid the congressman from Alaska.
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